This problem is at least implicitly raised by John Courtney Murray, SJ, in a famous passage from his book We Hold These Truths. “The question is sometimes raised, whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy,” he observes. “The question is invalid as well as impertinent; for the manner of its position inverts the order of values,” he

This is the political, philosophical foundation of liberalism, the theory upon which the United States was built. And it is the moral and political language that we are uncritically taught from the beginnings of our education. Is it any wonder that we have forgotten a Catholic language of justice, the common good, solidarity, and charity?

If we Christians were to live our civic lives as though politics mattered less, we might find that — well, politics matters less. And we would thus be more likely to resist the siren call of the kind of partisan zealotry that defeats civic friendship.

This poetic ordering tells us that we are not reading a scientific account of creation. Our author is not interested in telling us how or when the universe came into being. Rather, both by the literary form and the orderly content of the prose-poem, the author is making the claim that the universe is orderly. Some things are ordered toward and by

no such thing as a common good. Thus each individual rights-bearing person is free to pursue his private view of the good. To the extent that the term common good still has any use in such a scheme, it is nothing more than the accumulation of individual goods attained by autonomous rights-bearers as they not only seek their own good, but define the

Catholicism understands freedom in its full sense to be something that is achieved through moral choices ordered toward the good.

We must begin to recover a moral language that is formed by Catholic moral doctrine rather than by liberal political theory. I am fully aware that it may be a quixotic effort. But the effort is worth the hope that we Catholics might once again be a witness to the integrity of faith, rather than participants in its demise.

Now, of course, the epistle is an apologetic letter, written by a Christian to explain and defend Christian faith and practice. Its descriptions of second-century Christian life might be more aspirational than descriptive. Nonetheless, the observation that Christians live on a level that transcends the law is an important one, rich with meaning for

understanding that the human person is radically autonomous and individual, and that society makes no morally legitimate claims upon him.